On November 22, Judge Amos Mazzant, of the Eastern District of Texas sitting in Sherman, issued a nationwide injunction blocking implementation of the highly-anticipated changes to the Overtime Rule. A group of 21 state attorneys general, including Ken Paxton of Texas, sued to block implementation of the rule which was slated to take effect on December 1.

The rule change would have raised the overtime exemption for salaried executive, administrative, and professional employees from $455 a week to $921 per week.

In other words, administrative employees making less than $47,892 per year would have been entitled to overtime if they worked more than 40 hours in a week.

The court found that the Department of Labor (DOL) exceeded its statutory authority in issuing the rule change. The court’s decision is available on the Texas Attorney General’s website: http://tinyurl.com/zzdo4mw.

The DOL stated it is considering its legal options. It has not yet announced whether it will appeal the injunction to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. The DOL press release can be viewed here: https://www.dol.gov/WHD/overtime/final2016/.

As a practical matter, the ruling comes too late for most businesses.

The DOL announced the proposed rule change on July 6, 2015. The Department received over 290,000 comments to the proposed rule change. On May 18, 2016 the DOL released the final rule and warned the new rule would take effect on December 1.

Larger businesses adopted strategies for complying with the new rule months ago. Businesses that planned to comply and announced those plans to employees will hesitate to change course because of the cost of making changes at this late date, uncertainty whether the ruling will stand, and harm to employee morale.